Britain's professors, lecturers and student trade unionists appear to be united in arms against what they most hate and fear: academic celebrity, student fees, profit and loss, one-to-one tutorials and America. Grayling's New College of the Humanities may be no more than an egotists' lecture agency, better located at Heathrow Terminal 5, but the rage it has evoked is fascinating.

What Grayling has done is caricature the British university. He has cartooned it as no longer an academic community but a high-end luxury consumable for the middle classes, operating roughly half a year, with dons coming and going at will, handing down wisdom in between television and book tours. Just when state universities have been freed by the coalition to triple their income per student (initially at public expense) to £9,000, Grayling has mischievously doubled that to £18,000.

The new institute will offer bursaries, which the left complains "condescend to the deserving poor", to a fifth of the intake. These will be cross-subsidised not, as in state universities, by taxpayers and future graduates but direct from the fees pool. Grayling thus reveals today's "anti-fees" demonstrators for what they are: middle-class militants protecting their parents' incomes from fees today and their own incomes from a graduate tax tomorrow. He wants to make the rich pips squeak.

For Eagleton, "nausea wells to the throat" at the thought of globe-trotting "prima donnas" jumping from state universities into the trough of lucre. He derides Grayling's creation as Oxbridge on Thames, "raking off money from the rich" and thus relegating existing universities to a second division. He omits to mention his own Grayling-ite credentials, as "excellence in English distinguished visitor" to America's private Notre Dame Catholic university. There he gives three weeks' teaching per semester for an undisclosed sum. Moral consistency has never been a Marxist strong suit, though Eagleton protects himself by lecturing on "the death of criticism" and "problems of interpretation".

Grayling's enemies like to see British universities as a welfare state of the intellect. Indeed it is a common intellectual conceit to see all professions as, at heart, welfare. But the academic left needs the comfort blanket of state finance for a reason. It covers the unpleasant truth that universities are a benefit chiefly to the present and future middle classes. Universities in general redistribute money from average tax payers to rich ones and are anti-egalitarian. Their staff do not teach in sink schools or give literacy classes in prison or wrestle with Haringey social services. They dine at high table. Some get so upset they must spit in the soup.

What consenting adults do in Bloomsbury has never borne too much scrutiny. If Grayling, Dawkins, Pinker, Ferguson and the other freelancers think they can charge rich kids £18,000 a year to catch fleeting glimpses of their grey eminences in the academic transit lounge, good luck to them. If they have found backers for the project, good luck to them too, though it tells us more about the funny money swilling round London these days. If Placido Domingo can sign up for Fifa's Team Blatter, who knows whether Team Grayling may not soon be poached by Roman Abramovich for his Chelsea academicals?

I blame the Liberal Democrats. Their impact on every coalition policy has been dire, but nowhere more than in abolishing university fees while still pretending they exist. By converting the student cost of a university education into a postponed surtax, and loading the immediate cost on to the Treasury, the coalition relieves thousands of families who could well afford fees from doing so. Why should any parent meet their offspring's future tax liability at age 18?

Yet by implying that fees still exist, the Lib Dems must have deterred thousands of poorer students from applying to university. The policy is as cruel as it is mendacious. To alleviate the mendacity, the Lib Dems have insisted that the government and universities offer extensive bursaries to relieve the nonexistent "fees". Even the president of the national union of students admitted on radio that bursaries were not needed to pay fees but to ease "the perception" of future poverty. This is even if those who are poor need not pay back the fees. The bursaries must be the weirdest tax relief in history, benefiting a class of English person defined not by their own income but by that of their parents long ago.

Nor is this all. Fee abolition will now impose a heavy burden on the Treasury, rising from £25bn to £70bn in three years' time. The student loan company, which carries this debt under government guarantee, forecasts that a full third of it will be unrecoverable. As a result, individual universities have been banned from taking extra students, a nonsense in a recession. The nation finds itself paying a higher bill for fewer students, purely so as to relieve the rich of paying fees. Intake is curbed, with a bias against humanities and "softer" subjects that tend to favour poorer students. The bias is elitist.

This is not just coalition policy. Labour also favours no up-front fees but a graduate tax. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, dare not admit this since his political interest is to leave students thinking themselves persecuted by a Tory state. He is deterring the young from going to university for party advantage.

This is the desperate state of affairs that Grayling and co have ridiculed. Their college is exploiting the global intellectual melting pot that is London, to make a point and make a profit. In this they are no different from any publisher, broadcaster, magazine or private clinic.

They have lobbed a few well-aimed grenades at the preference of state universities for incomprehensible research at the expense of teaching, for science at the expense of humanities and for scholarly pursuit at the expense of career opportunities. The proposed emphasis on developing a student's critical, logical and life skills is admirable, as is the determination to draw on London's cultural vitality. That said, I would still be amazed if the venture succeeds.

Grayling would have been better advised to take over an existing college with charitable status. Universities are still constitutionally independent. It is their long addiction to public subsidy that has made them Whitehall poodles. Grayling could have declined government money and taken control of his own fees and salaries. Oxford and Cambridge could do that tomorrow if they had the guts. Someone has now shown them the way. But the tangled rage Grayling has evoked cannot have strengthened their courage.